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Deep Linking Now Possible With YouTube Vidoes

Sharing videos via YouTube is what the fun is all about. Sometimes, however, the "good part" is somewhere in the middle of the video, and you have to sit through minutes of tedium to reach the money shot. No longer. Google has created a way for people to link to specific times within their videos, meaning you can jump straight to the action.

How many times has a friend shared a video with you and said something like, "Wait until it gets to 2 minutes 38 seconds!"? The time spent waiting for the good part your buddy wants you to see can be anywhere from entertaining to downright boring.

In order to allow friends to share their favorite parts of videos, YouTube announced the ability to "deep link" to YouTube videos. This means you can now not only link to a YouTube video itself, but you can also link directly to a specific time within each video.

Google says that in order to create a deep link, you have to add "#t=1m15s" to the end of a YouTube video URL. So your whole link would be something like http://www.youtube.com/videoID#t1m15s. This sets the link to the time 1:15 in the video. Of course, you can replace the numbers before the 'm' and the 's' with anything you like, setting up the link to any part of the video you wish.

Google will also automatically create links if a viewer mentions a specific time in the comments section. If someone writes, "LOL, 1:15 is hysterical", this will become a hyperlink. Other viewers will then be able to click on that link and jump to that moment in the video.

Thanks, Google. Keep the good stuff coming.

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